Liquid, digits, finger tutting, finger connect, gloving: A case study on how technology/computation affects dancerly styles?

[Diego Maranan]

(Apologies for x-posting!)

Hi folks,

I'm doing an MA at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.  I'm currently doing an internet-based ethnographic study of certain genres of electronic dance music (EDM) dance, particularly liquid, digits, finger-tutting, finger-connect, and gloving, among other styles. I've been in contact with members of that community for about a year now and it seems that dancers of these styles have developed a multi-faceted relationship towards digital technology that encompasses not just in the way they share choreographic work (through online video recordings or live video), but also in their dancerly (and often incredibly detailed and technical) treatment of space and the body, in the way they further the development of their craft, and in their use of digitally-generated visual annotations to emphasize certain technical aspects of their dancing.

I know about the role that technology plays in shaping particular choreographic vocabularies by a particular choreographer-auteurs or dance companies. But I'm having trouble locating scholarly work on the role technology/computation has had in shaping dance vocabularies of an entire community of dance practitioners, particularly urban and popular dance. For example, where can I find rigorous cultural and movement analysis of the robot dance?

The central question of my research asks how notions drawn from technology, digital communication, and digital data representations influenced these EDM dancers' movement vocabularies and their attention to space, time, and the body. What I hope the study will arrive at is a description of how technology and computational representations of the world are changing the way these dancers mobilize and attend to their bodies and to space, as well as construct novel, meaningful (and really beautiful!) movement.

If you would like to learn more about this study, I've set up a little corner in the Web to document what I am able to publicly:
http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/diegom/

Many thanks and best wishes to everyone!

Diego